The present invention relates to a material handling and sorting system, particularly, although not exclusively, for handling and sorting packages within a mechanised mail sorting office. Within such an office packets need to be sorted according to destination into a particular one of many bags. Machines employed for this purpose hitherto, include several loading stations where operators feed-in the packets and indicate their destination, and a mechanism for conveying the packets to destination bags where they are unloaded. A typical system includes loading mechanisms for transferring packets from stationary input pockets onto a continuous moving sequence of containers which pass by all destinations in turn where the packets are unloaded as required. These conventional machines have proved complex and expensive to manufacture.